A myth about low-skilled workers

The “Gang of Eight” senators working on comprehensive immigration reform (including Arizona’s John McCain and Jeff Flake) have reportedly hit a snag over a guest-worker program for the future.

That’s not surprising. The politics of a guest-worker program are difficult enough. The policy specifics are mind-numbing. Once you wander into that snake pit, it’s difficult to find a way out.

And it’s all based upon a false premise perpetuated by the business community: that the country has an ongoing need for large numbers of low-skilled imported workers. And that, in turn, is based on the false premise that illegal immigrants are doing work that legal workers won’t. Except for in agriculture, that’s not true.

The Pew Research Hispanic Center has taken the closest look at the jobs that illegal immigrants are taking and the percentage of the workforce in each category they represent. The highest percentages are in construction-job categories, such as brickmasons, drywall installers and roofers. But, even in these categories, illegal workers make up substantially less than 50 percent of the workforce.

Illegal immigrants are just 27 percent of the country’s maids and housekeepers. They are just 28 percent of the dishwashers and 19 percent of the cooks.

If there is a shortage of something, its price will go up. That’s as true of labor as it is of eggs. And inflation-adjusted wages for low-skilled workers in the United States are stagnant or declining. That’s an indication of a surplus of such labor, not a shortage.

Nor is there a realistic prospect of such a shortage in the future. Despite all the emphasis on higher education and the expansion of programs to make it more accessible, less than a third of young adults 25 to 34 years old are obtaining a college degree or higher. About a third of young adults have a high-school diploma or less.

The business community may prefer imported low-skilled labor to domestic low-skilled workers. But there is little question that imported low-skilled labor depresses the wages of domestic workers. Why should national policy accommodate this business preference at the expense of lower-income Americans?

This is not a matter of maintaining international competitiveness. Low-skilled labor is concentrated in construction and service trades that are geographically bound. Someone in India can’t frame a house in Gilbert or make the beds in a Scottsdale hotel.

The business community’s trump card is the claim that if a legal way for low-skilled workers to come here isn’t offered, they will come illegally anyway. But the technology exists to lock illegal workers out of the formal economy through electronic verification of work eligibility via E-Verify. If the jobs aren’t available in the formal sector, the flow of illegal workers won’t be a big problem.

Regretfully, Republicans have bought the business community’s line about the need for a robust ongoing program to import low-skilled workers. And that leads to a series of tough-to-resolve issues:

How big of a program? Who decides and on what basis? Is the guest worker tied to a specific job, or can he or she move around? Does an employer who wants to import a foreign low-skilled worker have to demonstrate that there were no domestic workers who would take the job? At what pay rate? Does the guest worker have a path to permanent residency and citizenship?

It’s little surprise that, having gone down this unproductive route, the Gang of Eight would run into snags and stalemates. All these subsidiary issues are contentious, and some of them are virtually impossible to satisfactorily resolve.

A better approach would be to modestly increase the number of work visas available for low-skilled workers outside of agriculture. Give priority to those with an employer sponsor. Give those who receive one the freedom to move from job to job and a pathway to permanent legal residency and citizenship if continually employed. Make a low cap on the program the protection for domestic workers, not complicated formulas administered by bureaucrats.

Get past the unproductive snag on low-skilled workers and on to the issue on which the business community does have a legitimate case: the need to substantially increase work visas for high-skilled immigrants.

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